It will take a long time to clean up after Donald Trump, but the GOP is still best suited to lead the country.

Op-ed by Jay Caruso @ TheAtlantic.com, Oct. 18 (He is Editorial Writer @ The Dallas Morning News.)

I wasn’t born a Republican—I became one. My parents were ’60s hippies whom I vaguely remember celebrating the election of Jimmy Carter; I was enamored with Bill Clinton in 1992; to me, George H. W. Bush was one of those “old people” who didn’t understand what was going on in the world. But I came to disagree with Democrats on matters of taxation and spending, and I rejected the idea that the government is best at solving problems. So, in 1994, I cheered when the GOP took control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years.

Now, nearly a quarter century later, after a lot of ups and downs, good candidates and bad, I’m not going to let Donald Trump force me out of the Republican Party.

The GOP was never perfect. It never will be perfect.

But not too long ago we had in Mitt Romney a party leader of great character. Like many other Republicans, I thought he had a good shot at winning in 2012. Then Romney’s campaign allowed the Democrats to define an obviously honorable man as a bloodsucking oligarch who was once a high-school bully, caused a woman to get cancer, and tortured dogs like some twisted version of Clark Griswold.

After Romney’s loss and before Trump’s win, the GOP didn’t change much, but the base of the party did. Republican voters became increasingly hostile to the “establishment,” which they perceived as having capitulated to President Barack Obama [....]